G. H. Q. (Montreuil-Sur-Mer)

The Project Gutenberg EBook of G. H. Q., by Frank Fox and G.S.O.

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: G. H. Q.

       (Montreuil-Sur-Mer)

Author: Frank Fox

        G.S.O.

Release Date: September 5, 2013 [EBook #43644]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK G. H. Q. ***

Produced by Bruce Albrecht, Max Jackson and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

A number of apparent typographical errors have been corrected, and other changes made as detailed here.

Changes are shown in the text with mouse-hover popups, as are footnotes.

G. H. Q.

(MONTREUIL-SUR-MER).

G. H. Q.

(MONTREUIL-SUR-MER)

BY

G. S. O.

WITH A MAP AND THIRTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS.

LONDON:

PHILIP ALLAN & CO.,

QUALITY COURT, CHANCERY LANE, W.C.

1920.

PRINTED BY

WHITEHEAD BROS., WOLVERHAMPTON.

TO

THE PEOPLE AT HOME

WHOSE UNBENDING RESOLUTION

AND UNGRUDGING GENEROSITY

UPHELD THE SOLDIERS' CONFIDENCE

THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY

DEDICATED BY THE

AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

FOREWORD.

That fantastic life at G.H.Q., so greatly detached from the normal—the life of the men whose words had power to send Armies into and out of action, to give this Division rest and surcease from the agony of the struggle, to assign to that Division the stress of a new effort; the men into whose hands the nation poured millions without stint and at whose call the whole world moved to spin or dig or forge—will it be of interest now to recall some of its memories, to attempt an intimate picture of its routine?

Fantastic the life was truly. One man of imagination, who had done his work in the line so well as to win a reputation for great courage and administrative ability, and had carried through with a quiet skill and a simple dutifulness the responsibilities of the small family of a regiment, found, when he was transferred to G.H.Q., that the sense of responsibility was too great for his temperament. He was not a very important cog of the machine. But the feeling that the motion which his hand started set going so great a series of actions got on his nerves to the extent that he could neither sleep nor eat with comfort, nor decide the simplest matter without torturing doubt as to whether it were right or wrong. He moved on within a few days.

Fortunately that sense of vision was rare. The average man was content to carry on with his task with what good judgment Heaven gave him, deciding as the established routine, or the common-sense shift of a new emergency, dictated.

But looking back, reflecting on all the woeful results that might have sprung from a careless blunder, from too great haste, from too deliberate hesitation, from over fear or over confidence, it is to be seen how fantastic, how abnormal was the life centred in that little walled town of Montreuil, the focus of a spider's web of wires, at one end of which were the soldiers in their trenches, at the other the workers of the world at their benches. Yet we ate, drank, slept, played a little and talked, very much as if we were workers in some commercial house, directing coffee from a plantation to a warehouse and then to a breakfast table, instead of dealing in blood and tears, drawing without stint on human life and human hope so that the idea of Right and Liberty might be saved in the world.

It is well that Imagination went to sleep, or was lacking. For so the work could be done and the war directed to its safe conclusion. But a record of the life we lived seems now, in retrospect, almost indecorous. It is as if we should not have munched food, talked trivialities, while before our eyes and under our hands was played out the greatest tragedy Man has known; as if it would have been more fitting if we had gone from uneasy couches, tight-lipped and anxious, to our desks, haunted always by a sense of doom.

It was not like that. And, such as it was, I attempt to record it—a serious enough life in any sense of the word, monkish in its denial of some pleasures, rigid in discipline, exacting in work, but neither austere nor anxious—such a life as studious boys might live in a Public School, if there can be imagined a Public School in which sport was reduced to the minimum essential to keep one fit for hard swotting. But a life with some relaxations, and some pleasures, cheerful, actually light-hearted.

Questions of the conduct of the war must obtrude somewhat in this book, but it will be only in so much as they are a necessary background to the story of the life of G.H.Q.—of G.H.Q. in its later phase when it had moved from St. Omer to Montreuil and had become what it was in the final result, a capable Board of Directors of as glorious a company of soldiers as the world has known. There will be no attempt at a history of the war, no battle pictures, which are usually vain efforts to measure the immeasurable. Yet it is hoped that the reader will get from it some idea of the character and the complexities of the struggle.

Already fogs of controversy are obscuring many of the facts of the war. There is a controversy whether the first Commander-in-Chief should have been recalled when he was; about the merits of the second Commander-in-Chief; about the unity of command decision; about the relative merits of a strategy which would concentrate everything for a supreme effort in France and a strategy which would seek a back door to the German citadel; about the actual cause and duration of the shell shortage. In accordance with our British custom we are mostly taking sides, following some leader and putting our faith in his views, and all his views, implicitly. Thus are formed parties. I claim with honesty, and perhaps with correctness, not to belong to any of the parties. I have set down these observations on G.H.Q. without a thought of whether they may support this view or that view on the conduct of the war.

THE AUTHOR.

THE BOULOGNE GATE

CHAPTER I.

BEFORE G.H.Q. WENT TO MONTREUIL.

The first stages of the War—Trench War, a good German invention—The Battle of Eyes—Waiting for the Big Push—The Loos disappointment—Moving G.H.Q. to Montreuil.

It was the task of General Headquarters to try to see the War as a whole, to obtain a knowledge not only of the strictly military situation but, to an extent, also of the moral and the political situation of the enemy and of our own forces. In the later stages of the campaign that task was being done, pace all the critics, with an efficiency that was wonderful, seeing that before the Great War the British nation did not allow its Army any chance at all of war practice on a big scale. Our Generals, whatever skill they might have won in studying the theory of war, had had no opportunity to practise big movements. They were very much in the position of men trained in the running of a small provincial store who were asked suddenly to undertake the conduct of one of the mammoth universal providers.

It is of G.H.Q. in the later stages of the war that I write, not G.H.Q. of the earlier stages, when our Army was finding its feet. But a slight generalisation regarding those earlier stages is necessary to an understanding of the subsequent growth of the Army organisation and of its Board of Directors at G.H.Q.

The small Army which crossed to France in 1914 was organised as an Expeditionary Force for a war of movement. It did gallant work in the first phase, as all have admitted. When the war of movement stopped and the struggle settled down to the War of the Trenches, though that gave a good opportunity of recruiting, it brought up an entirely new set of problems, for which our organisation had made no provision at all and in which British natural gifts did not have the best chance of display. Indeed our training system at home refused in 1914-15 to recognise Trench War. The New Armies were trained on the same lines as the old Regular Army, but of course more hurriedly, more intensively, less efficiently. They learned Trench Warfare—an almost entirely different game—when they got out to the Front. A reversal of the process—to have taught the much simpler Trench Warfare in the home camps and left the teaching of movement warfare to training intervals in France—was an obviously more economical system, and it was that adopted at a later stage.

When a considered history of the war comes to be written, probably it will give to the German High Command high praise for this period of Trench War. It was the one conspicuously good invention of the enemy. It enabled him almost completely to stop the war in the one theatre where he had to meet troops superior to his own, whilst his forces ranged round Europe winning cheap victories and finally (though too late as it proved) vanquishing opposition elsewhere. There is no doubt that the Trench War device baffled our side for a time. I like the story of Marshal Joffre explaining the position to an American war correspondent and adding:

You see there is nothing to be done.

No. I suppose nobody could do anything?

Nobody.

Not even Napoleon?

But Marshal Joffre paused at that, and after a moment's reflection said:

Yes, I suppose Napoleon could do something.

Finally the something came in the shape of the Tank.

When Field Marshal Earl Haig took over the chief command he adopted the system of frequent raids to give to the Trench War some of the character of moving war, and that proved a highly useful step. Still, this Trench War was not of the genius of our people; and it was very dull. If I were seeking the fit adjective which could be applied to it in its superlative it would certainly not be exciting nor yet dangerous. The life was exciting and it was dangerous—a little. It was, however, neither very exciting nor very dangerous. But it was very, very curious. Trench war had its moments, its hours of high emotion, of intense excitement, of crowding dangers. Its routine—on the Western front—was laborious, almost to the point of tediousness, demanding a sober and constant carefulness in detail, and—provided you watched the minutes and the winds, the twigs and the sky, had eyes, ears, and nerves always on the alert—it was reasonably safe.

Trench War exciting? No; you could not allow it to be. The moments were rare (to the majority of officers they never came) when the call was for a gallant shout and a forward rush in which leadership took its most obvious and its easiest form. The hours were always when, with cool, suspicious, deducting mind, you were watching a sector, awaiting the enemy's raiding attack or directing your own. Stalking and being stalked, it was interesting, absorbing, but you could not allow it to be exciting, or you would not do your work properly. War was robbed, in that phase of the struggle, of most of its fascinations by the spectacled Germans who had spent the previous half-century in the counting house, the laboratory, and the cellar, preparing to destroy the humanities of civilisation. Trench War was a grubbing kind of business.

Dangerous? Naturally, to an extent. But not nearly so dangerous as one might judge from the lurid accounts of imaginative writers. It had its hours of peril, of horror. But it was not all the time dangerous. For six days out of seven, on an average, a soldier, if he observed the strictest caution, was following a dangerous trade, nothing more. On the seventh day—I speak in averages—he had his risk about doubled. On very rare occasions he had to take the risk of a fireman who goes into a blazing house to rescue a child, or a policeman who stops a madly bolting horse. Ordinarily one had to be careful to watch the traffic; that was all. If you wished to take a long lingering look at the enemy's trench you used a periscope. For a brief glance (to get a wide field of view) you looked over the parapet. There were differing estimates of the length of time it was safe to show your head over the parapet. Some said five seconds, others twenty-five.

The German is slow in the up-take, remarked the officer who insisted that twenty-five seconds was quite a safe time to look over the parapet.

Behind the parapet it was almost as safe—and on dry days as pleasant—as on a marine parade. A solid fortification of sandbags, proof against any blow except that of a big high-explosive shell, enclosed on each side a walk, drained, paved, lined with dug-outs, in places adorned with little flower beds. I write, of course, of the Trench War in its settled stage—not of those grim struggles around Ypres in the Autumn of 1914.

Not exciting, not as dangerous as one would imagine, the Trench War was more curious, more uncanny, than it is possible to describe. Try to imagine the huge ditch, some 300 miles long, from the North Sea to the Swiss lakes, which was our trench, facing another ditch which was their trench, all lined with Eyes, thousands, millions of Eyes. All day, all night, these Eyes stare and stare. At night the hands serving them break up the dark with star shells, and the brains behind them welcome the day, only because it makes the scrutiny of Death more easy. On the front edge of each ditch the Eyes are thick in line; farther back, in every possible post of observation, are groups of Eyes, and Eyes soar up into the air now and again to stare into the secrets concealed on the other side. There are Eyes of infantry, Eyes of artillery, Eyes of airmen. The scrutiny never pauses for an instant. Let an Eye blink a moment and it may mean catastrophe, a stealthy rush on a trench or a flood of poisoning gas. The great dark gutter stretching across Belgium and France was fringed with staring Eyes; and every Eye had to record its message to G.H.Q.

Carefulness, tedious, monotonous carefulness, absolute punctuality, and grave attention to every detail—these were the warrior qualities in the Trench War period. The minutes had to be watched, the grass watched lest you trod down a path and gave away some secret to the Eyes yonder. All the minute details of life were hedged in with precautions and penalties.

This tedious Trench War was not the game for British blood, though on the whole it was done well, especially after Loos when the raiding policy was instituted. But it was tedious; and very clearly it was impossible to win while it lasted. For victory the Germans had to be turned out of those trenches. So, during the tedium of the Trench War we would comfort ourselves with the thought that very soon the Big Push must come. Often the most definite news came that it was fixed for the next month. This very definite news was usually traced back to some signaller who had overheard something on the telephone. Perhaps Divisional H.Q. had a Member of Parliament (doing a Cook's tour of the Front) to dinner and peremptory messages were going down to the Coast asking for lobsters to be sent up. Now a guileless signaller would never imagine that Generals and the like were interested in lobster. If he thought of their diet at all he probably imagined they lived on trench maps—of which the consumption was certainly huge. Thus the signaller, hearing strange peremptory messages about lobsters, might conclude that this was some very secret code, and, the Big Push being in all our thoughts, that it would have reference to that most certainly. But for many months it was not the Big Push; it was only the lobster, which was the standard of gaiety and dissipation at a Mess Dinner.

At the time of the Loos attack it did really seem that the Big Push had come. But we were disappointed. Perhaps at the Front we were as impatient at the result as the people at home, but we could soothe our impatience with the thought of the greatness of the technical difficulties of arranging an advance